Community-mapped cameras
How far to the nearest camera?
Pick a distance and see how much of Altoona sits farther than that from any license plate reader camera volunteers have put on the community map. It works only from that public, unverified map; it is not a count of cameras and not a safety or privacy score.
Vendor-reported camera counts and Council records are on the ALPR tracker. To check one street, try the camera check.
The quick view
Where the community map shows no camera nearby
Loading the map…
Altoona, shaded by distance to the nearest community-mapped camera
Red near a community-mapped camera and inside the distance you picked, shading to green where none is near. Straight-line distance, inside the area. Altoona’s city limit is the gold line.
The community camera map this page uses was fetched for a fixed box that ends a few miles east of Altoona, so land past the dashed line is left out of this area and its figures, not counted as having no camera. Spots near that line may have mapped cameras just past it.
Mapping completeness differs from place to place, so shares are not comparable between areas.
Not a camera-free zone. A green, light or empty area means only that nobody has mapped a camera there. It says nothing about cameras that aren’t on the map.
Community mapping can be missing, stale, duplicated or misplaced. Sources and caveats
Camera positions come from the OpenStreetMap nodes tagged as license plate readers that the tracker’s nearby map already draws, and are sampled, not copied: each is moved to the center of its square on a fixed grid about 130 feet across, and cameras sharing a square become one dot, so the dots are not a count and can understate one. They are community-mapped and unverified, carry no brand or owner, and are never counted here: the tracker’s city counts come from a separate classification.
The area is sampled on a regular grid, and each grid point gets the straight-line distance to its nearest mapped camera, including cameras up to 2 miles outside the area. Grid points are not addresses or homes, and distances past 2 miles read as “2 miles or more.” A wide area such as Des Moines uses a coarser grid so the page stays quick.
Straight-line distance is not road distance, a camera’s field of view, or how far it can read a plate. Under 250 feet the answer is only as exact as the mapped positions, which are approximate, and the snapping and the sampling grid each add up to about 90 feet, up to about 180 feet together, so read the shortest distances as rough.
There is no month filter. The public map layer carries positions only, and OpenStreetMap’s own date on a camera is its last edit, not when it went up or was first mapped, so a month view would mislead. The camera-orders timeline shows the community map’s Altoona total at past dates instead.
Every figure is worked out in your browser from those public inputs and your settings. Nothing you change here is saved or sent anywhere. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
More settings
Map settings
Altoona by default. Widen it to the land around the city, or pick a nearby city on the same community map.
Cameras in the cities around Altoona can be nearer to a spot than any in Altoona. Narrow this to see how much they change the map and the figures.
Ranks the city’s grid points by distance and shades only the farthest share.
By distance
How the answer changes with distance
The share of the area you picked (Altoona unless you change it) within each preset distance of a community-mapped camera.
The same question for each city on the community map, at the distance on the slider: how much of its area is within that distance of a mapped camera the settings count, how much is farther, and how far its typical and farthest spots are from one.
Reading the map
How to read it
- Red
- A camera on the community map is near, within the distance you picked at its strongest. It says nothing about what the camera records, who runs it, or whether it works.
- Green
- Farther from every camera on the community map, the deeper the farther: eight times the distance you picked or more at full green. It does not mean unwatched.
- Two shades
- Under More settings: shaded means beyond the distance and clear means within it.
- Geometry, not effects
- The map makes no claim about crime, safety, or whether cameras change either.
- A camera missing or gone
- The map is OpenStreetMap’s, so a fix there reaches this page the next time the site refreshes its map layers.